Let’s face it, the overall appearance of our bodies in general cause us a great deal of stress and hard work, particularly when body fat percentages are involved.

Every single day, countless people all over the world struggle with their weight, usually because of the fact that they’re simply carrying too much fat and not anywhere near enough muscle.

People think that losing fat and gaining muscle is all about looking good, and whilst that is indeed a handy bonus, in reality, losing fat and building muscle is all about maintaining optimal levels of health and fitness.

Remember, different people have different goals, which means that some may want to burn fat, some may want to build muscle, whilst others may be happy to simply maintain their current fat and muscle levels as they currently are.

Whatever your goals and objectives may be, calculating calorie consumption is absolutely vital for so many different reasons. In order for us to lose weight, we need to create a calorie deficit, which means basically that we need to be consuming less calories than our bodies require.

To maintain our weight, we need to calculate calorie consumption based upon how many calories we require on a daily basis, and in order to gain muscle, we need to consume slightly more than is required for maintenance alone.

Calculating calorie consumption, however, is far easier said than done, so to help you, take a look at these handy tips.

Work out your daily requirements

Before you progress any further, the first thing you need to do is calculate your daily caloric requirements.

This number of calories will be the amount of calories that your body requires in order to maintain it in its current form.

The good news is that you can easily work out exactly how many daily calories you require, by simply logging onto the internet and using a number of free and simple calorie consumption calculators.

These convertors obviously don’t know exactly how many you need because they don’t know your genetic makeup, but generally speaking, they’re able to provide a pretty accurate calculation.

The user begins by entering their height, their current weight, their age, their gender, and roughly how active they are on average.

They enter all of the above, then the calculator simply gives them a number, telling them roughly how many calories they require per day, to maintain their bodies in their current states.

Use calorie counting and tracking software

Image source: Microsoft

Thanks to the popularity of smart phones and smart devices, there are now more apps and pieces of software than ever before, all designed to help you to calculate, track, and monitor exactly how many calories you’re consuming each day.

Most of these apps allow you to not only enter the foods and drinks you’ve consumed manually, but you can also scan barcodes, enter weights and quantities, and then be left with the exact number of calories found in each food and drink item. You can use these apps to set yourself a target caloric consumption for each day to maintain, lose weight, or even weight gain.

As you make each entry, the number of calories you’re allowed will be added to the list, whilst the app will tell you how many calories you have left until you reach your daily requirement. On top of that, you can also manually enter how much physical exercise you may have performed, and roughly how many calories you burnt off.

This software and apps are handy because they leave nothing to chance and allow you to enter absolutely everything you’ve consumed. The disadvantage is the fact that you have to manually log everything.

Read nutritional labels

Another very effective method of ensuring that you track and monitor exactly how many calories you’re consuming each day, is to do things the old-fashioned way, and to actually read the backs of nutritional labels to get the nutritional information.

The labels will clearly tell you exactly how many calories in total the food or drink contains, along with how many calories they contain per serving.

So for example, if a certain food had 600 calories in total, if you were to eat exactly half, you would know for a fact that you had just consumed 300 calories.

Again, unless you have a great memory and are great with numbers, you will still need to make a note of how many calories you’ve consumed, but once you’re in the habit of reading labels and taking notes, it will come as second nature to you, meaning that you’ll soon be doing it without realising.

Letting wearables do the work for you

Wearable devices have become a popular way of tracking calories ever since someone invented the first calorie counter back in 1977. A number of recent studies have, however, called into question the accuracy of such devices.

The important question is – does this really matter? Well, if you are interested in a ballpark figure, then no. But inaccurate information about calories could actually derail many peoples’ progress.

Fitness trackers work well for resting caloric burn and sedentary activities, but the more active we become typically the less accurate the resulting data will be. There is an advantage to using devices with a heart rate monitor, as these fitness trackers can detect changes in exercise intensity. In general, the more parameters you can have, the more accurate your equation should be.

To make trackers as accurate as possible, it is important to wear your device of choice in the same position each day and keep the personal details such as height and weight up-to-date. If the tracker provides the option, it is also important to correctly calibrate the length of a walking stride.

Be careful of hidden calories

A lot of people don’t actually realise that, whilst certain healthy foods are indeed healthy and good for them, they may still contain large quantities of calories, and as you know, once you consume more calories than your body requires, you’ll find your body storing what is left as body fat.

Some of the worst offenders are fruits, fruit juices, and sugary vegetables.

The reason for this, is that, although they’re still very healthy and beneficial, they do still contain natural fructose sugars, which are high in calories and can therefore push you over your daily caloric requirements if you aren’t careful.

If you have a glass of fresh orange juice with your breakfast, don’t forget to count the calories in your juice as well.

Reda El

My name is Reda El, entrepreneur and fitness fanatic for 8 years, and also BJJ blue Belt. I've gathered both my experience and the information I've read throughout these years on my website Shreddedphysique.com.

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